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Topic: News on the future of Terragen. (Read 3821 times)

Hey everyone, this may be slightly off topic, but since many of us probably use World Machine in conjunction with Terragen, I thought people here might be interested.

Matt Fairclough, primary developer of Terragen, has just made a big announcement regarding the future of Terragen. He setup a page to go over the details, and there's some pretty exciting stuff on there. There's sample images, and even a movie of what is to come in the next year or two with TG. I highly recommend you all go take a look:

It looks like "TGD" will be relying much more on displacement to get higher levels of detail, and will also have full planetary capability, both of these things being similar to MojoWorld, which seldom has use for heightfields as a result of its reliance on procedural displacement. However it does look like Terragen will still have a good amount of use for heightfields. It will be able to use DEM's as always (2 of the images on the page above are based on DEM's), but will actually be able to "enhance" them procedurally, adding detail (perceptually superior, although the accuracy is a question, especially if you are doing GIS work - but for this just turn off the displacement) with displacements based on fractal and noise functions. The same will be true for World Machine terrains. Our beautiful WM terrains will be enhanced even further by TGD's displacement capabilities. And since "Procedural Erosion" seems, at least for now, to be a pipe dream, WM's erosion capabilities will still be very important to a realistic scene in TGD.